Telstra close to releasing 5G in Australia

Remember when mobile phones used to be for calls and texts only (and snake)? Then 3G meant we could use the internet on our phones. Then 4G meant we could stream Netflix on our phones.

Well, we’re now on the brink of going to 5G and that will again dramatically change our lives, according to a report on news.com.au

The report states that Telstra is winning the race among our three major phone providers and will beat Optus and Vodafone to provide 5G to Australians first.

Telstra have spent billions upgrading its networks and have been quietly testing more than 200 5G sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra and Perth.

Word is that Telstra will have 5G available in the first half of this year, and the cost won’t be significantly different to your current plans, but you will need a handset that is 5G capable to be able to access it.

Telstra chief executive office Andy Penn told news.com.au that some of the big phone manufacturers were on board to provide 5G handsets but the big fish – Apple was unlikely to have a 5G capable handset available until next year.

Why will it be so good to have 5G? Well it’s a little hard to predict the future but the jump in speeds will be significant. In fact, they say a 4K movie that has an average size of 50-100GB could be downloaded to your phone in seconds. We’ve come a long way from waiting an hour to get one song from Napster!

Those sort of speeds and low latency will enable a host of new applications and technology including huge advancements in autonomous vehicles, robotics, augmented reality and virtual gaming.

“I think the next 20 years will be incredible in the sense that there’s been a lot of digitisation in the world but that digitisation has tended to be limited to what I would call the services layer, whereas the physical world hasn’t really been digitised,” Mr Penn said.

Sounds fascinating. And perhaps we will be laughing at our nbn speeds even sooner than we thought.